Johnny can read, after all

 fiction, literature, reading habits  No Responses »
Apr 282009
 

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.

“At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable.”

Maybe not. But any statistician will tell you to wait for the next survey, and maybe the one after that: it may be a dead cat bounce. Still, it’s way better than more decline. Pity about poetry and drama – still sinking.

The full report can be downloaded here, and in the same place you can find a six page summary of the Reading at Risk report which started the heartburn.

 Posted by bruce at 11:35 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Pound: The ABC of Reading

 literature, reading habits, writers  No Responses »
Apr 242009
 
Ezra Pound in 1914

Ezra Pound in 1914

The teacher or lecturer is a danger. He very seldom recognises his nature or his position. The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour.

A pleasure of aging: to reconsider books that have helped to form your attitudes. Another: not having to talk for an hour.

Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading (1934 – but I read it in the early 1960s) could be described as an eccentric textbook, but it’s more of a manifesto. It comprises a little generalisation about literature, a lot of examples of poetry – almost an anthology – some commentary and a reading list.

Pound thought it necessary to have a standard, to read the best that has been done in its kind. What complicates this goal for him is that no one language holds a monopoly of literary virtue. For Pound, a real understanding of poetry requires a swag of languages (Chinese, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, Provencal and more). Cross-cultural comparison holds no terrors. To see that Greek drama is not all that good, he advises you to read Homer. Don’t bother with German – he has read it all for you, and found nothing standard-setting. The monoglot gets a look-in. Pound concedes that you can get most of it by reading ‘authorised’ translations such as Pound’s own of Seafarer, Golding’s Ovid or Gavin Douglas’s Virgil. But the strongest impression left by the book – on one seventeen year old reader, at least – is that anyone without a working knowledge of half-a-dozen languages is a dabbler.

As Pound might say: balls. But at seventeen, the book conjured up a marvellous, if deeply confusing landscape – all those exotic peaks waiting to be conquered – and the promise of initiation into the mysteries of the craft, all presented far more enticingly than the plodding textbooks with their pother about iambic pentameter. I suppose I was open to the idea of a cosmopolitan canon because of my immersion in music ? Continue reading »

 Posted by bruce at 2:27 pm  Tagged with: , , ,

Just walk away

 reading habits, writers  No Responses »
Apr 202009
 

While looking about for a couple of useful Burney links, I came across this perturbing story. The scholar Ellen Moody some years ago started a number of online discussions of Burney’s novels. She is obviously a woman of fortitude; most of us would have given up, faced with the resulting torrent of flames, trivia and vicious pranks . But she and her colleagues hung in there long enough to get results. Sample threads are on her site.

Dr Moody concludes her page:

Since the existence of large fan communities generates money and favorable partisan coterie publicity, it is in the interest of anyone who works or becomes involved with any projects involving Austen and (lately increasingly) Burney to begin with an exaggerated respect; any sharp criticism must be presented in somewhat disguised forms.The phenomenon of the cult figure or group of texts is an important one in our era, and we need frank discussion of how different cults arise, what imagined characteristics cult figures are typically endowed with by their fans, what kinds of people become fervent fans of literary writers and their characters, and what is the effect of such cults on serious study of works of the imagination.

We could do all that. Or we could just tip-toe away. They’re making too much noise to notice.

 Posted by bruce at 12:48 am  Tagged with: , , ,

Read it here second

 public debate, reading habits  No Responses »
Feb 202009
 

We hear a lot about the travails of newspapers, but this article in The New Republic details a fast-growing crisis. If enough majors collapse – the Los Angeles Times has halved, the mighty New York Times faces a debt crisis – we could be deprived, not only of the printed article, but the skills, experience and institutional strengths on which real news depends.

‘Real news’? Isn’t it all just a medium of social control? Ever hear of the Web? To which there are easy answers: yes, it’s real. For example, over 200 people died in the Victorian bushfires. But don’t take it from the press: go count. No it’s not just a medium of social control unless, like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and most arts graduates from the 1980s, you regard the entire society, including all its opposed elements, as one gigantic and malevolent System. As for the Web, I’ve yet to encounter a convincing, comprehensive news site unconnected with a newspaper. Drudge, the Huffington Report etc are parasitic on the grunt-work of trained, full-time journalists and editors.

Here’s a chunk of the New Republic piece.

These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism. This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and–particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels–the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country. Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny. Other than news aggregators such as Google News–which link to articles from publications that still derive most of their revenue from print–the most successful news sites are oriented to specialized audiences. No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.

Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict.

The situation in Australia is a little better, but the decline is here, too.

 Posted by bruce at 11:03 am

Good ol’ books

 reading habits, web writing  No Responses »
Sep 272008
 

From a blog by Sarah Horrigan, who works as an e-learning developer:

? my head is far more full of ideas than it has been for a long time and part of that is in no small part down to the diminished distractability factor. With a book you engage with the book. You don’t go ‘ooooh, there’s another book over there, I’ll just go investigate that and be back to this in a bit’. It’s you and the page. The words don’t link anywhere. Don’t animate. Don’t do anything fancy. Don’t overheat and shut down at inappropriate moments (glares pointedly at laptop). But I’m struck by how much we push forwards with new technologies and leave behind technologies which are perfectly adequate, beautiful in their simplicity and may well do an even better job at helping you make mental connections.

 Posted by bruce at 10:18 pm  Tagged with:

Opportunity costs for kids

 internet, reading habits  No Responses »
Feb 192008
 

Graeme Philipson, whose views I attacked a few posts ago, dislikes people who so much as question the new electronic order. How he would despise someone like Susan Jacoby, who thinks the US is becoming stupider and more ignorant. She believes the decline of reading is in part to blame. (Her other causes, ‘anti-rationalism’, populism and fundamentalism.)

She says, forget about what kids are getting from the screen; what are they missing on the page? In business terms, what are the opportunity costs of kids not reading books?

Which in turn makes me wonder (a) what do kids 11-19 actually read nowadays? (b) what did they read in the 1960s (or whichever period one selects) and (c) is anyone framing up the question in something like that way? It would be easy to kill any such project by pointing out that what’s read makes sense only if you consider how it’s read. But perhaps there’s a way around that.

 Posted by bruce at 9:55 pm
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